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mortifying

adjectiveC1Rare in speech; mostly a word you read · #13,526 of 15,258leans spoken

Mortifying means causing deep embarrassment. Utterly mortifying, a mortifying moment, how mortifying.

It is much stronger than embarrassing and is usually said afterwards with a laugh. The Latin behind it means causing death, which is a fair account of how it feels at the time.

Definitions of mortifying

  1. 1adjectivemortifyingCausing deep embarrassment.C1

    “It was mortifying when my phone rang loudly in the middle of the funeral.”

mortifying is a quality.

Where it comes from

  1. Proto-Indo-European

    *mer-

  2. Latin

    mortificō — cause death

  3. Middle French

    mortifier

  4. Anglo-Norman

    mortifier

  5. English

    mortify

  6. English, today

    mortifying

Built from

  • -ficō · Latin — -fy

mortify comes from Anglo-Norman mortifier, Middle French mortifier, from Latin mortificō (“cause death”), from Latin mors (“death”) + -ficō (“-fy”).

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practise this word

mortifying in the wild

  • Canada had previously dominated international competitions, and the loss was called "a national calamity, a national humiliation, and a mortifying experience", by journalist Elmer Ferguson.

    East York Lyndhursts

From Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. These sentences were written by other people about their own subjects; they are here to show the word at work, not as anybody’s opinion.

Related words

the -ficō family

glorifymortifymortifying

mortifying — used about once every 23,598 pages · #13,526 · point at the bar for the others